An updated version of the Prometheus Bound and Greek Drama Presentation

1. GREEK DRAMA AND PROMETHEUS BOUND

2. First: a distinction
Two (main) kinds of Greek Drama
Tragedy – Violent and weighty: dealt with big
themes and important people. Prometheus Bound
is a tragedy.
Comedy – Silly, bawdy, often highly sexual. The
word comedy comes from the Greek “komos” –
or, a drunken procession. Usually they mock
actual living people (like Socrates).
These categories still apply in Shakespeare’s time.
Each year, at the Murray Shakespeare Festival, we
usually see one of each.

3. Tragedy comes from “tragedoia,” which
means “Goat Song” – a couple of reasons
why
1. The winner got a goat.
2. Sometimes a goat would be sacrificed
to Dionysius during a series of plays.
3. The goat sacrificed would be a
substitution for a human (readers of
the Old Testament will recognize this;
think Abraham and Isaac ) – a gift or
penance to the gods.
4. The hero of a play, like a goat, must
be sacrificed. For what, exactly?
Often some kind of hubris, or desire
to be on an equal level with the gods.
Or perhaps a willing ignorance of the
gods commands.
Here’s a cool explanation of this:
http://cgim.dbq.edu/cgim/greece05/greek_tragedy.htm

4. Festival of Dionysius
In the 6th century B.C., there
would be a festival to Dionysius –
the god of wine and fertility.
The events would involve singing,
drinking, recitations of Homer,
and contests during which plays
were written to be performed.
This would continue in Athens,
the heart of Greece, for years to
come.

5. The Greek Theater Here is a view of the
amphitheater at Epidaurus
– it goes 50+ rows back
and seats about 14,00000.
Here’s a view from the top.
There was no lighting,
obviously, or anything to
help the acoustics.
However, visitors to the
amphitheater even today
note the remarkable way
that sound caries.

6. The Theater of Dionysius Here’s where plays were
performed in Athens:
In the fifth century, when
Prometheus Bound was
performed, the audience
would have been mostly
men. Much like modern
stadiums and arenas, the
theater would have been
multi-purpose: political
assemblies and speeches
would occur there as well.

7. • Theatron = area of seats for the
audience hollowed out from the
hillside
• Orchestra = large area in front of
the stage where the chorus sang
and danced
• Parados = walled walkway used
by the chorus to enter and exit
the stage
• Pro-scenium = a long, low stage
behind the orchestra
• Skene = building that contained
the actors’ dressing rooms
A Diagram of the Theater

8. In addition:
The “mechane” – the “machine” would lift
actors from above the “skene” building
The “ekkyklema” was a trolley that would
come out of the “skene” – whenever this
happened, it meant that the scene shifted to
the indoors.

9. Actors
That’s right: Actors. Women were
not allowed on stage, so men even
played the women’s roles.
All actors wore masks. They didn’t
rely on facial expressions – think
about it: how would the audience
in the top row have seen them?
Instead, actors used their bodies:
lots of gestures, very physical.
Performances were highly artificial.

10. Realism in Modern Theater
This is Marlon Brando in A
Streetcar Named Desire from
the late 1940s.
Brando was famed for giving
highly realistic, emotional
performances.
Think about it: you’re in a
theater, so you know what’s
happening in front of you isn’t
real – but actors like Brando (in
theater and movies) bring to the
stage a sense of authenticity .
You can even see this in his
clothing.

11. Realism in Ancient Greek Theater
• The Greek Theater didn’t care about
realism. Actors would play multiple
roles.
• The stories were meant to express a
“version” of the story, but the
audiences (and playwrights) knew
that this was a poetic version.
• Actors wore masks, would shout their
lines at the top of their lungs.
• Things that had happened over the
courses of days would be reduced
down to a few hours.

12. The Chorus
In addition, a “Chorus” would speak lines both to the
audience and to the actors.
There were about fifteen of them – sometimes they
would be speak all at once. Sometimes they would
alternate lines.
This is how the Oceanids work in Prometheus Bound.
Sometimes Choruses represent “the average person”
or even the audience themselves – they provide a
commentary on the events that happen. Sometimes
they tell the audience how to interpret what they’ve
seen. Or they represent conventional wisdom, often to
contradict the wild ideas of the main character.

13. Watch this!
Go to this link: I want you to begin watching at 17:00 and go to 27:00.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-vZHdZMehy2p-
47bdejitFUIfenxxoaq/view
This is a performance from about 30 years ago of another play by
Aeschylus called Agamemnon. They tried to recreate Greek Drama as
close as they could to an actual performance.

14. One more thing:
Prometheus Bound is a tragedy. What that means, more clearly is:
- It’s about a person from a high position
- Tragedy couldn’t be about common people. Prometheus is a god.
- They are supposed to be “great” people, greater than the rest of us as an
audience.
- That person falls because of a fatal flaw
- Often, this is “hubris,” or pride. This may be a sin against the gods.
- As an audience, we are supposed to experience catharsis – which
literally means purgation . . .

15. Catharsis
Therefore, when we watch a tragedy we are supposed
to feel “pity and fear.”
Tragedies have High goals – you don’t watch them
passively.
So the question is: how does Prometheus Bound –
which is a tragedy- attempt to make us feel “pity and
fear.”

16. Catharsis – Read this short section from the
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
First of all, the tragic catharsis might be a purgation. Fear can obviously be an insidious thing that undermines life and poisons it with
anxiety. It wouldbe good to flush this feeling from our systems, bring it into the open, and clear the air. This may explain the appeal of
horror movies, that they redirect our fears toward something external, grotesque, and finally ridiculous, in order to puncture them. On the
other hand, fear might have a secret allure, so that what we need to purge is the desire for the thrill that comes with fear. The horror
movie also provides a safe way to indulge and satisfy the longing to feel afraid, and go home afterward satisfied; the desire is purged,
temporarily, by being fed. Our souls are so many-headed that opposite satisfactions may be felt at the same time, but I think these two
really are opposite. In the first sense of purgation, the horror movie is a kind of medicine that does its work and leaves the soul healthier,
while in the second sense it is a potentially addictive drug. Either explanation may account for the popularity of these movies among
teenagers, since fear is so much a fact of that time of life. For those of us who are older, the tear-jerker may have more appeal, offering a
way to purge the regrets of our lives in a sentimental outpouring of pity. As with fear, this purgation too may be either medicinal or drug-
like.
This idea of purgation, in its various forms, is what we usually mean when we call something cathartic. People speak of watching football,
or boxing, as a catharsis of violent urges, or call a shouting match with a friend a useful catharsis of buried resentment. This is a practical
purpose that drama may also serve, but it has no particular connection with beauty or truth; to be good in this purgative way, a drama has
no need to be good in any other way. No one would be tempted to confuse the feeling at the end of a horror movie with what Aristotle
calls "the tragic pleasure," nor to call such a movie a tragedy. But the English word catharsis does not contain everything that is in the
Greek word. Let us look at other things it might mean.
Catharsis in Greek can mean purification. While purging something means getting rid of it, purifying something means getting rid of the
worse or baser parts of it. It is possible that tragedy purifies the feelings themselves of fear and pity. These arise in us in crude ways,
attached to all sorts of objects. Perhaps the poet educates our sensibilities, our powers to feel and be moved, by refining them and
attaching them to less easily discernible objects. There is a line in The Wasteland, "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." Alfred
Hitchcock once made us all feel a little shudder when we took showers. The poetic imagination is limited only by its skill, and can turn any
object into a focus for any feeling. Some people turn to poetry to find delicious and exquisite new ways to feel old feelings, and consider
themselves to enter in that way into a purified state. It has been argued that this sort of thing is what tragedy and the tragic pleasure are
all about, but it doesn't match up with my experience. Sophocles does make me fear and pity human knowledge when I watch
the Oedipus Tyrannus, but this is not a refinement of those feelings but a discovery that they belong to a surprising object. Sophocles is
not training my feelings, but using them to show me something worthy of wonder.

17. Finally:
Prometheus Bound was supposedly written by Aeschylus, perhaps the
greatest of all Greek playwrights.
However, this is disputed. It may be more like a play written in the style
of Aeschylus.
The question of its authorship is interesting, because it deals with one
of the oldest Greek myths, and it makes a point about it.

18. Prometheus as a character originally appeared in
Hesiod’s “Theogony,” written in the 7th Century BC

19. Hesiod’s Works and Days also describes the creation of the world
Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-
bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all4 the
deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus,
and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth,
and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who
unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise
counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos
came forth Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born
Aether5and Day, whom she conceived and bare from
union in love with Erebus. And Earth first bare starry
Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every side, and
to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods.
And she brought forth long Hills, graceful haunts of the
goddess-Nymphs who dwell amongst the glens of the
hills. She bare also the fruitless deep with his raging swell,
Pontus, without sweet union of love.

20. KRATOS (MIGHT) BIA (VIOLENCE / AUTHORITY)
A Bit about the characters you’re seeing here:

21. • Titans are the second order of divine beings. They overthrow the first
“primordial gods” – (Heaven) Uranus and (Earth) Gaia
• The Titans are led by Cronus, who is overthrow by his son Zeus. These are the
“Gods” (terms are kind of vague)
• Zeus and the gods defeat the Titans, some join with them, like Prometheus and
his brother.

22. • Prometheus, a Titan, “works” for
Zeus, but he’s still pretty irritated
with them.
• Prometheus and his brother creates
man, who is a “nobler
animal”
• They give them life, and a special
unique kind of consciousness but . . .
• Not the ability to protect
themselves, unlike animals (also
created by P and E)
• So P, loving his creation, takes fire
from the gods and gives it to man.
“In his perplexity he resorted to his brother
Prometheus, who, with the aid of Minerva,
went up to heaven, and lighted his torch at
the chariot of the sun. and brought down
fire to man. With this gift man was more
than a match for all other animals. It
enabled him to make weapons wherewith to
subdue them; tools with which to cultivate
the earth; to warm his dwelling, so as to be
comparatively independent of climate; and
finally to introduce the arts and to coin
money, the means of trade and commerce.”
- Bulfinch’s Mythology
It is not known whether the creator made him of divine materials, or whether in the earth, so lately
separated from heaven, there lurked still some heavenly seeds. Prometheus took some of this earth,
and kneading it up with water, made man in the image of the gods. He gave him an upright stature,
so that while all other animals turn their faces downward, and look to the earth, he raises his to
heaven, and gazes on the stars. – Bulfinch’s Mythology

23. A Few Key Passages

30. "Titan! to whose immortal eyes
The sufferings of mortality,
Seen in their sad reality,
Were not as things that gods despise;
What was thy pity's recompense?
A silent suffering, and intense;
The rock, the vulture, and the chain;
All that the proud can feel of pain;
The agony they do not show;
The suffocating sense of woe.
"Thy godlike crime was to be kind;
To render with thy precepts less
The sum of human wretchedness,
And strengthen man with his own mind.
And, baffled as thou wert from high,
Still, in thy patient energy
In the endurance and repulse
Of thine impenetrable spirit,
Which earth and heaven could not convulse,
A mighty lesson we inherit."
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
From Prometheus
Later poets (writing around the same time as Mary Shelley)
would see Prometheus as a hero, because he defied order and
overcame the (tyrannical) authority of the gods.

31. Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy, was a very influential
poet. He wrote a kind of challenge to Aeschylus’ poem
called Prometheus Unbound, which asks us to sympathize
with this hero.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
From Prometheus Unbound

32. The Prometheus Myth is
A story about defying orders
A story about power and its consequences
A story about arbitrary power
A story about the limits of knowledge
A story about forbidden knowledge
A story about rebellion and
A story about our sympathies with rebels rather than what they rebel
against

33. The Bible, of course, offers us another
powerful narrative of Forbidden Knowledge.